Manufacturing and assembly of high strength hardened steel is near black art.
Pathfinders do exactly what they say, they lead you through unknown territory to the outcome of the manufacturing journey you embarked on. Often things go boom, you find out why, add it to your corpus of black art knowledge, and keep pathfinding until you run out of budget / succeed / change mission.
So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like.
With that said, the cult that surrounds his projects where people say things like "this is what success looks like" when a big metal thing blows up unexpectedly or robot car goes flying off an exit ramp is a never ending source of amusement.
The rocket has static landing coordinates, and if the boat were to move a few meters to either side it would miss it.
But there are definitely no “static coordinates”, it would have to move a lot more than a few meters for the rocket to miss, and it would be due to trajectory and fuel constraints rather than ability to maneuver.
When something doesn't behave as desired, it is a failure. You can learn from failure, that's how you get to success, but the failure itself is not a success.
"So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like. "
If blowing up a prototype enables changes to the manufacturing process that prevent the same thing happening later with a live crew on board, then it's considered a success. It doesn't matter who the CEO of the company happens to be.
AFAIK nobody has built something like this before. To have it fail during an early test doesn't seem unusual.
Suppose SpaceX had used a very similar prototype, but some process or engineer had caught the fault. Few here would be taking the lack of an explosion as evidence that SpaceX are not innovative. Instead, if anything, they would be praising the superb processes in addition to the cool prototype.
So, there is always room to improve. The reaction to this essentially anodyne point here has been really interesting.
See also: Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 1 - and that’s purely spacecraft which have killed people, never mind the vast list of experimental aviation deaths.
Much better to blow up some prototypes than some humans.
I don't see any constructive reason to look at it negatively, failure is part of testing. We don't test to find success, we test to find failures so that we can get them out of our systems.
We are silly animals. Links I can't help but click on....comments I can't help to respond to. The algorithms are winning.
In a Chemistry Lab, I put two elements together to show off a little explosion to my students, if it did. It was a successful demonstration, if it didn't go according to plan, it was a failure. And we will be wondering why this didn't work.
The OP said it from his perspective of pathfinder. And I assume these results were expected. And if it didn't blew up and they did not understand why it didn't, it create more uncertainty and variables during real launch. And I am sure everyone would want to minimise of that happening.
I am not sure how hard this is to see thing from his perspective, I would agree if Elon calling it a success would be hyperbole, but the OP stated he is a pathfinder, and finding out failure is exactly his job.
Experimental rocket/spacecraft (that's a fairly rapid prototype as far as rockets are concerned), made out of non-traditional material for rockets, fails one way yielding tons of data to do it better on the next version.
That's some modicum of success no matter how you slice it. Go plug 'rocket launch fail' or 'rocket explosion' or some such into YouTube and watch various rockets failing spectacularly on the launchpad both during development and carrying actual payloads and compare it to this failure at this stage of development.
I mean, look at stuff like Apollo 1. An electrical fire killed all of the crew during a test less roughly a month before launch. Starship is a very early prototype that probably yielded more actionable data than the Apollo 1 accident did.
I find it fascinating that we get to observe this all playing out in real time. You might agree.
Also, someone on twitter said a horizontal weld failed. If this is true I'm surprised they didn't do two things: - tune their welding procedure by destructive testing with the same type of steel - and X-ray (or use another non-destructive method) the welds after assembly.
Welding (including more interesting metals) is my hobby so I had an opportunity to see that there a huge amount of knowledge in the field. There are routine testing procedures that ensure situations like this one don't happen.
Of course, they might also be on a deadline, and just went ahead and built it to spec and test it. But I don't think you can just say there's routine testing procedures that ensure rockets never blow up. If that were the case we wouldn't have needed SpaceX to reinvigorate the space industry.
Yes, that is also a possibility. I'm not sure how likely is it that a pressure vessel would fail along a weld if that weld was without faults and as strong as other surfaces. Perhaps it matters that there is also a sharp corner there?
>Of course, they might also be on a deadline, and just went ahead and built it to spec and test it. But I don't think you can just say there's routine testing procedures that ensure rockets never blow up.
I agree if they are trying to make it as light as possible and pushing the boundaries a bit while experimenting. One can't innovate without risk.
It would be good if they released more info about this incident.
The welding process probably isn't optimized or fully inspected and the weakest parts would expectedly be the welds.
I do this pretty much any time I’m doing something new - I have three revisions of a solar panel stand sat out on the lawn right now, each better than the last, as I needed to build the thing to see how it actually held up to forces as it’s easier and more accurate (ah, how do I fit a screwdriver in this gap to fasten this?) than doing an engineering simulation.
The design engineer: "We know on paper how the product needs to function in terms of strength, weight, durability, etc"
The manufacturing engineer: "We've never made something like this before. I've got a couple ideas how we can bend/shape/form/machine/weld these materials into the shape, but I don't know how those bend/shape/form/machine/welding operations are going to affect the underlying physical properties of the material. I know on paper these operations should be OK, and we can inspect them as we go, but again we've never done them before, we most likely will overlook something or discovery something new, so let's try one of them and break it early before we get too far down a potentially bad path."
The test engineer: "Well it worked up until X point then failed, here's the data for you design engineer and you manufacturing engineer, better try something else".
Design engineer: "Shoot, what we thought we were manufacturing isn't actually what got manufactured. Hmmm, is it even possible to make the part we need? Or do we now need to redesign the part because it can't actually be made. Let's try another approach. And maybe it's smart to pursue a few of these in parallel to increase our overall chance of success"
Those 3 roles can be the same person or separate organizations of hundreds/thousands of people. Requirements documents, manufacturing/quality reports, test reports, inspection reports are the language of this technical interchange.